Oldest Planet Ever Discovered

crymeph0 writes "NASA has found the oldest known planet in a globular star cluster in the constellation Scorpius. At 13.7 billion years old, it's just slighly (~1 billion years) younger than the universe itself. Get more info from HubbleSite"

Comments

Heavy elements

[ramk13]

What struck me the most from reading about it is that enough heavy elements (Fe, Si, etc) were around at the time to form the planet. That was one of the main reasons it was thought that planets couldn't have formed that early - you only had light gases around. So apparently it doesn't take a few billions years of fusion to get enough solid material for a planet. I wonder what other changes this will bring about in terms of the search-for-life campaign. The window just got a little bigger.

Re:Heavy elements and eating into the timeframe

[nimblebrain]

Well, they're begging the question somewhat, but it seems true that globular clusters metal deficient. Jupiter's atmosphere is 82% hydrogen, 14% helium and only a trace of heavier elements. Who knows what goes on at the core, but that would seem to indicate that planets don't need rock to form.

That said, if we found some moons around it somehow at some point in the future, there would be a lot of questions that need answering.

Is it worrying anyone else, though, how thoroughly we're cutting in to the upper estimate of the age of the universe according to Big Bang Theory? Prior guesses on the age of the universe in BBT were in the 9-12 billion range.

Invoking tweaks on inflation theory and 'anti-gravity' via the cosmological constant, the upper limit has been moved up to 15 billion years. Now here we are with a planet... a close planet (all things considered, 7200 light years isn't that far away on a grand scale :), that's 13 billion years old plus star and cluster formation time, and some of the other observations from the furthest visible reaches coming back from ye olde Hubble... how much further can we cut into this without jeopardizing the 15 billion year estimate?

Something to consider...